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Absolute Sounds ££

Tony L said:
I guess the markup/profit margin may be so astronomical on some Veblen kit they only need to sell a couple to make a very healthy living. How much does a $200k amp actually cost to make? Amplification is a mature technology so not much if any original thinking required. Most will be class A, so a fair bit of metal, but I can’t see them costing more than a few $k in parts and then a big block of alloy to CNC into something blingy somewhere.
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A Linn dealer I got chatting to at a drinks do implied to me that he could survive on not much more than his markup from selling a couple of £100k systems a year - which he achieved easily. Not bad for suspended turntables and class d amplifiers.
 
AS are not on there own though, there's plenty of other distributors selling very high price products, though AS probably has some of the most expensive.
This morning YG Acoustics announced a new product 'Vantage Live' which consists of a pair of active 3 way speakers with a feature packed 'control box' . Interesting product so I went and had a look at the UK distributors website, the passive Vantage starts at £29k , the YG acoustics speaker range starts at £19k and goes to over £360k.
Sometimes when I see the prices of new equipment in magazines or online I do wonder if I'm living on a different planet.
 
Woodface said:
I really dislike the uber bling end of Hifi & I just don’t believe it will sound any better. There are high priced products which perform, anecdotally DCS for example, but a quality DAC/Pre into active speakers will outperform most of this guff.
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There's certainly a touch of dictator chic to some of the blingy styling.

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Del monaco said:
It amazes me that he has so much money and yet so little style.
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it’s dictator bling. Saddam Hussain built modern palaces to look old. Anything Russian,centuries old,is used by Putin ( he walks through doors that he couldn’t possibly reach the handle of). Trump just does the same badly. Boris has tried to modernise this with nursery bling. One of the compensations of being so powerless is the fools the powerful make of themselves. You won’t be surprised I’m a fan of Private Eye….
 
I have no problem with people selling outrageously expensive kit to very wealthy individuals. It's business and redistributes wealth, so good luck to AS!

I strongly suspect that one can put together a system that, to all intents and purposes, sounds as good as one of AS's £200k systems for "reasonable" money, so AS don't harm real enthusiasts with more normal budgets. For example, a pair of larger active ATCs (lower cost pro versions), plus a decent DAC, would likely do it.
 
‘Taste’ is a strange concept anyway. Obviously if someone’s got shedloads of money they have a better chance of showing off their taste, good or bad, than someone less well-off. But who gets to decide what’s good and what’s bad taste? Just browsing through estate agents’ websites I see all sorts of horrors, and these are mostly properties
where a lot of time and money has been spent creating a ‘look’. The current trend seems to be for ‘70s retro, with lots of brown and beige.

To me, it looks horrible, but that’s maybe because I never liked the 70s look first time around. Could I do better? I doubt it.
 
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